LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

The XML project: developing digital literacy in modern languages

This project is funded by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) looking at ways to develop digital literacy within different discipline areas. The project will see students creating Xerte learning objects as assessed materials for their course in Spanish language and content. It will also offer bursaries to all students in Modern Languages, to create materials in preparation for their Year Abroad. Students will learn about the tool, Xerte, and about copyright and metadata implications for the creation of OERs. They will then act as ambassadors and tutors to other staff and students wishing to engage with open practice and Xerte throughout the University of Southampton, via the existing successful Digital Champions (http://www.diglit.soton.ac.uk/champions/) scheme, which sees students acting as roving mentors/tutors for the use of technology in the institution.

iTunes and You

In the iTunes and You project, we propose to take existing disparate material, which has been published as open content for research and teaching by humanities staff at the University of Southampton, and work with the university marketing department to repackage it as learning modules in the form of iTunesU course packages. This will be an innovative way to showcase how research and teaching resources can be combined in bite-sized ways which maximises their use for by a global audience of learners.

The OpenLIVES Project

LLAS has been funded by the JISC to lead the OpenLIVES project (Learning Insights from the Voices of Emigres from Spain). This project will digitise resources documenting the migration experiences of Spanish emigrés. Once released as open content, the raw data will be developed as open educational resources for a range of teaching and learning contexts in humanities and social sciences on topics such as migration, life history, employability skills, research skills, language learning. The project will use a tested process model for sharing expertise and teaching ideas to create reusable and innovative teaching resources. A key element of this project will be to involve students at all stages of resource development: using the original data, evaluating the teaching resources and creating/peer-reviewing their own learning resources.

The FAVOR Project

LLAS has been funded by JISC to lead The FAVOR (Find a Voice through Open Resources) project. The Project will showcase the excellent and often unrecognised work of part-time, hourly-paid language teachers in HE, and engage them in activities which will enhance the student experience. Tutors will publish teaching resources as open content, and create a suite of new Open Educational Resources designed to assist prospective students in understanding the nature of language study at HE level. Outputs will be disseminated to schools and evaluated by prospective and existing students and will contribute to the national agenda for the promotion and support of language learning.

A Web-as-Corpus approach to populating Wikiversity for teaching about Islam and Muslims in language, linguistics and area studies

Wikiversity is an online open-source public repository for University-level teaching and learning materials, based on the Wikipedia architecture for “crowd-sourcing”: it relies on volunteers to collaborate by actively contributing their knowledge for the common good. Undoubtedly a wealth of learning resources exists on the WWW, but scattered on individual websites, in a wide range of formats and structures. Individual lecturers prepare online teaching materials to support their own teaching, but few know of Wikiversity, and few have time or inclination to take on the extra step of formally registering and uploading their materials to Wikiversity. This project aims to organise and semi-automate the harvesting of these scattered resources, by adapting Web-as-Corpus techniques from Corpus Linguistics.

Community Café Project

The project will address a particular problem: the scarcity of up-to-date, online resources for community languages. The aim of the project is to work together to co-create a community collection of online language and cultural materials which will significantly enhance existing materials to support community languages.

HumBox Project

HumBox is a collection of more than 1000 humanities teaching resources that have been uploaded to the web for lecturers to use freely. You can browse and download from the collection without creating an account, however, if you would like to take advantage of a number of productivity tools built into the design, then register using the simple form, create a profile of yourself... and away you go! You can also upload your own teaching materials to the collection from your profile page.

British Sign Language: Quality Embedding of the Discipline (BSL:QED)

The main aim of this project is to establish a new on-line curriculum for the teaching of British Sign Language (BSL) at HE level.

E-learning project: Learning Object Creator (LOC) - an authoring tool for teachers to create online learning materials

The Learning Object Creator (LOC) Tool is a simple authoring tool for teachers, which has been specifically designed to enable them to create their own e-learning materials without the need for technical support or training. It has been developed by the LLAS Subject Centre, in collaboration with the University of Southampton eLanguages group, according to a tried and tested effective pedagogical design developed over four years.